The Age of Obama
The 'Decade of Greed,' etc., R.I.P.
By HOLMAN W. JENKINS, JR.
OCTOBER 29, 2008
Nineteen eighty-two was a lucky time (as your columnist can attest) to be leaving college. Whatever faults various authorities find in the "decade of greed," which was followed by another decade of greed, it marked the start of 25 years of exceptional prosperity and opportunity. Freer trade and the epochal joining of a couple billion Chinese and others into the global division of labor played a role. The ideas of Reagan and Thatcher, bringing the private sector back to a place of honor, played a role.
Is the age of Obama the beginning of a less golden age? We cast no aspersion on the man or his program. Mr. Obama, in his short career, has not strongly associated himself with any policy idea. His relation to his own proposals during the campaign has been pleasantly noncommittal, if generally liberal (as voters and the media are only now getting around to noticing).
His rise offers little insight either. His Senate primary and general election races were smoothed by the serendipitous bowing out of formidable opponents in each case, in divorce-related "scandals." His presidential hopes have been turned overnight into landslide hopes by a financial crisis that has left the public angry and confused, though not one that plays to any expertise of Mr. Obama's.
Yet if he wins next week, it could be with a sweeping mandate to decide, er, what his mandate will be. He's a presidential vehicle perfectly designed, or self-designed, to be driven by history, rather than driving it. And he comes just at the moment when, overnight, crashing down is just about every normal restraint against intrusive, redistributing, regulating government.
This is the door the remarkable Mr. Obama is about to waltz through.
In a two-party system, both parties need to be capable of governing, of having some long view of the central challenge -- which, arguably, in our case remains the financing challenge of the American welfare state. John McCain may not be much of an economist and hasn't adopted the "ownership society" as his slogan, but his health-care plan falls right in with tradition on the center right -- a spectrum that once included Bill Clinton -- of invoking a new role for individual responsibility and individual choice in making the welfare state work.
Democrats, in contrast, never really tell us where they want us to go. That hasn't been the Democratic way and Mr. Obama, in this, is a perfect Democrat -- as opaque on the big question as his party has been. Al Gore let on that he favored a single payer health-care system only two years after he lost the White House. Politics -- simple politics -- instead has been Democrats' governing philosophy, and Mr. Obama is, again, the perfect heir.
In an interesting piece of work, economist Henning Bohn has forecast the future voting propensities of an aging electorate based on two things: how much in taxes a median voter would expect to pay until retirement, and the present value of his or her expected Social Security and Medicare benefits.
His conclusion: It will make financial sense for the median voter to vote for higher taxes on his remaining working years and on younger people in order to secure his benefits.
If he's right, Democrats need to say only one thing when running for office -- and that's nothing intelligible about the funding dilemma of the welfare state or the need to address it. Mr. Obama has evidently learned his politics well. This week, he told Time Magazine's Joe Klein that, after the current financial crisis, "a new energy economy . . . That's going to be my No. 1 priority when I get into office."
This is a cipher, an air sandwich. Mr. Obama here affords himself a placeholder for a priority to be named later. He knows that such impractical, centrally planned "energy revolutions" have been preached by candidates and op-ed writers for decades, only to be forgotten after inauguration day in favor of less rhetorical agendas.
Mr. Obama's knack for eliciting pleasing feelings of self-regard in his followers is certainly a political virtue. (That so many of John McCain's supporters must hold their noses is, in its way, the equal and opposite virtue.) More than that, the vagueness of Mr. Obama's governing philosophy is a natural fit for a party that has long been wedded to the strategy that you get where you're going (a bigger welfare state) by not saying where you're going.
安息吧，“贪婪的十年”
By HOLMAN W. JENKINS, JR.
OCTOBER 29, 2008
1982年可是个离开大学的幸运时间（您的专栏作家可以证明这一点）。不论有关专家在这“贪婪的十年”里发现什么瑕疵，而且其后另一个贪婪的十年又接踵而来，它开启了一个25年异常繁荣和充满机会的时代。更加自由的贸易，几十亿中国人和其他国家的人划时代地加入全球劳动大军，发挥了作用。里根和撒切尔让私有行业重归荣耀的主张也发挥了作用。
奥巴马时代会是黄金成色开始褪色的时代吗？我们无意诽谤这个人或他的计划，然而奥巴马先生在他短暂的职业生涯里，从未对任何政策主张表现过强烈支持的态度。在选战期间他对自己的个人主张的表述给人的感觉一直是八面玲珑、态度暧昧，如果大体上看是主张变革的（正如选民和媒体直到现在才开始注意到）。
他的崛起也没有多少玄机了。由于强大对手的意外放弃和离婚“丑闻”，他的参议院初选和大选角逐可以说是一片坦途。他的总统希望由于一场让公众感到愤怒和困惑的金融危机而有望一夜之间获得压倒性胜利，尽管这场危机没有考验过奥巴马的任何才能。
然而如果他在下周的大选中获胜，可能就会出台一系列内容广泛的政令，这样就可以知道他的政令将是怎样的了。他是个完美设计或自我设计的总统机器，由时势所造，而不是去驾驭它。当突然爆发的经济崩溃按惯例将要对政府实施干预、重新分配和监管政策形成遏制时，他就横空出世了。
这是神奇的奥巴马先生正要跳着华尔兹顺利通过的大门。
在两党体系下，两个党都需要具备统治力，要能够对核心挑战提出长远观点，而值得商榷的是，在我们这种情况下，这种核心挑战仅剩下对美国福利国家地位的金融挑战。约翰·麦凯恩可能不是个好的经济学家，也没有接受“所有权社会”作为自己的口号，但是他的卫生保健计划正好符合了中右传统，这一传统的范围曾经包括了比尔·克林顿，它主张在保持福利国家正常运转的过程中为个人责任和个人选择赋予新的角色。
相比之下，民主党实际上从来没有告诉我们他们希望我们何去何从。这可不是惯常的民主作风，而奥巴马先生由于和他的党一样对重大问题态度模糊而成了完美的民主党人。艾尔·戈尔直到在争夺白宫总统宝座失利两年后，才透露说他支持一个单一付款人的卫生健康系统。权术，仅仅是权术，取而代之成为民主党的统治哲学，而奥巴马又正是其最佳继承者。
在一篇有趣的文章中，经济学家海宁·波恩基于以下两点对逐渐老龄化的选民的未来投票倾向进行了预测：中间年龄段的选民预期到退休前将支付的税款，他或她预期将获得的社会保险和医疗保险的现值。
他的结论是：如果中间年龄段的选民为了确保自己的利益而选择投票支持对他的剩余工作年限和对更年轻的人征收更高的税，那从金融方面是讲得通的。
如果他是对的，民主党人在竞选公职时只需说一件事情- 这个福利国家的融资困境不是那么容易理解的，无需多言。奥巴马先生显然深悟此道。本周他告诉时代杂志的乔·克莱恩，在现在的金融危机结束之后，“一个新的能源经济…将成为我就职后首先要考虑的事情。”
这等于零，一个空中三明治。在这一点上奥巴马先生为自己日后才会公布的优先权留了一个预留位置。他知道尽管这样一个不切实际、自上而下设计的“能源革命”被历届总统候选人和时事评论者鼓吹了几十年了，总统就职日一过它就会被忘掉，取而代之的是不那么华丽浮夸的议事日程。
奥巴马先生激发其追随者自我关注的满足感的本事无疑是个政治美德。(让约翰·麦凯恩的支持者肯定会捂住鼻子的是，这本身就是个南辕北辙自相矛盾的美德。) 不仅如此，奥巴马先生统治哲学的暧昧含糊天然就适合一个长期以来奉行走一步看一步战略（比如一个更大的福利国家）的党，而不告诉你们到底往哪里走。
面临崩溃的发达国家
Developed economies
Over the edge
Oct 30th 2008
From The Economist print edition
AS RECENTLY as a month ago, there were still hopes that America and Europe might just pull back from the precipice of a recession. Those hopes have been dashed. The economies of the rich world seem to have fallen off a cliff. The question now is the height of the drop.
Central banks are trying to cushion the fall. On October 29th the Federal Reserve lowered its target for the federal funds rate to 1%, matching the trough it reached in 2003. It may cut again. With remarkable speed, worries have shifted from inflation, which is still around 5%, to deflation. Fed officials still think that, if even pessimistic forecasts came to pass, inflation would not fall below zero. But Macroeconomic Advisers, a forecaster, now reckons that core inflation will fall to 1.3% by 2010, too close to zero for the Fed’s comfort. They expect the Fed to cut the federal funds rate to 0.5% in December and then, with scant room for more cuts, that it may try to stimulate growth using unconventional measures such as further expanding its lending facilities to banks and other firms.
The rate cut was needed. America’s economic data have become starkly weaker since the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in mid-September. The latest GDP numbers, released on October 30th, showed that output fell by an annualised 0.3% in the third quarter. Surveys of manufacturing activity have shifted down. Weekly initial claims for unemployment benefits have shot up. A monthly index of consumer attitudes compiled by the Conference Board, a research group, plummeted to a record low of 38 in October, down from 61.4 in September.
Confidence surveys are unreliable predictors of consumer spending. But the destruction of wealth through falling stockmarkets and tightening credit conditions are already having an effect. On a seasonally adjusted basis, light-vehicle sales in September were the lowest since 1992, according to Autodata Corp, a research firm. On October 28th Whirlpool, an appliance maker, gave warning that low home sales would cut revenue and Royal Caribbean Cruises, a cruise operator, lowered profit estimates because of “a significant deterioration recently in new bookings”.
A similar downward lurch is under way in Europe, where the European Central Bank seems poised to cut interest rates for the second time this autumn on November 6th. The Munich Ifo Institute’s index, which measures the mood of German businesses, sank to its lowest level for more than five years in October. Volvo wins the prize for statistic of the crunch to date. The Swedish firm said it had received a mere 115 orders for heavy trucks in Europe in the third quarter, down by 99.7% on the 41,970 order bookings during the same period of 2007.
America and Europe cannot count on exports to make up for faltering domestic demand, because the crisis has spread to emerging markets. Airbus and Boeing, for example, had counted on orders of 300 aircraft from India in the next five years to help offset slower demand in Europe and America. Some of those are in jeopardy. Jet Airways, India’s largest domestic carrier, announced its biggest quarterly loss in more than three years on October 25th.
Economists disagree about how bad it will get. Dean Maki of Barclays Capital says that falling wealth tends to affect consumer spending over many years rather than right away. It is just the opposite with changes in real income because of petrol prices. Consumer spending could conceivably be lifted by the sharp drop in oil prices that has unfolded since July, which Macroeconomic Advisers estimates to be worth more than $100 billion on an annualised basis. Mr Maki notes that consumer confidence plunged after the September 11th terrorist attacks but that Fed rate cuts enabled interest-free loans which dramatically boosted car sales. Another small positive sign is that home sales rose slightly in September and that house prices have actually risen in a few cities.
These glimmers may be snuffed out by the unprecedented tightening in credit now under way. According to Ed McKelvey of Goldman Sachs, the only comparable modern precedent is the federal government’s short-lived imposition of credit controls in early 1980, which produced a dramatic downturn in American consumer spending. That episode ended when controls were removed. Today, credit restraint chiefly depends on how long it takes the private sector to respond to policy actions such as the Fed’s commercial-paper purchases and the widespread recapitalisation of weakened banks. “Government is working as hard as it can, but in the end it’s the private sector that does the lending,” he says.
就在一个月前，人们还盼望着欧美各国能够从衰退的绝境中起死回生；而今，希望已完全破灭。各富裕国家的经济情况均摇摇欲坠，现在的问题只是将会摔得多惨。
各国央行纷纷推出举措减缓衰退。十月二十九日美联储将联邦基金利率下降至1%，再次采取和2003年一样的措施。利率还可能继续下调。以这种速度降下去，人们担心目前还在5%左右的通货膨胀将有可能转变为紧缩。但是美联储官方认为，即使悲观预测不行成真，通胀率仍不会降至零。但据宏观经济咨询公司估算，到2010年核心通货膨胀率有可能降至1.3%，这已与美联储零的底线太过接近了。该公司预测，12月份美联储有可能将基金利率下调至0.5%；12月之后，由于下调空间不足，美联储可能将采取向银行和其他公司外借设备等非常规手段以保持经济的增长。
降低利率是必要的。自九月中旬雷曼兄弟公司破产以来，美国经济数据已明显呈现劣势。10月30日公布的最新GDP数据显示，第三季度产量按年率计算负增长0.3%。制造业活动调查急跌，每周初次申请失业救济人数激增。美国经济咨商局公布十月份消费者信心指数较九月的61.4点下降了整整38点。
消费者信心指数对消费支出的预测虽不可靠，但股票市场暴跌带来的财产损失和变差的信用状况确确实实造成了影响。在经季节性调整制度背景下，据汽车数据公司调查显示，轻型汽车销售量已于九月份跌至1992年以来的最低点。10月28日电器厂家惠而浦提出警示称国内销售下降必将减少财政收入。同日，皇家加勒比海游轮公司称由于“一项新订单中的重大损失”下调了利润估算。
欧洲也正面临着类似的下降局面。欧洲央行准备好于11月6日进行秋季第二次利率下调。德国慕尼黑IFO研究机构编制的经济景气指数在五年多来于10月降低至最低。沃尔沃集团在此危机中受影响最为严重。这家瑞典企业第三季度仅仅接到欧洲115份重型汽车订单，较2007年同期的41970份下降了99.7%。
美国和欧洲不能靠出口来弥补岌岌可危的内需，因为危机已波及至新兴市场。空中客车公司和波音公司在未来五年内要靠印度的300个订单来抵消欧美市场减缓的需求。然而这笔订单也很危险。印度最大的航空公司捷特航空在10月25日刚刚公布了三年多以来季度最大损失报告。
经济学者对衰败前景观点不一。巴克莱资本的迪安·马基认为财富流失不会立即产生效应，而是会在未来数年内对消费支出造成持续影响。这于油价变化造成实际收入变化对消费支出的影响不同。自七月油价大幅跳水后居民消费如预料之中有所抬头，宏观经济咨询公司估计年增长约1000亿美元。迪安·马基指出，“九一一”后消费信心急降，而后利率下调贷款免息使得却增加了汽车销量。九月，部分城市房价上扬，而国内消费却小幅度有所增长，这也在一定程度上验证了这一预测。
然而，这一丝曙光也有可能被目前空前恶劣的信用状况扼杀。高盛经济学家麦凯维提出，现代史上唯一一次可以与目前状况媲美的是上个世纪八十年代初期联邦政府短命的信贷税收管制政策，那一次造成了美国居民消费支出的显著下降。管制结束后，下降局面立即结束。而今，信用约束的作用主要取决于个人能够多快对比如商业票据购买、萧条银行的广泛资产重整等政府决策做出反应。“政府尽一切努力调整，但贷款终究是个人决策。”他说道。
笑声工厂
If a new American comedy starts out with curses that would have made your great-grandmother blush and an obsession with poop and penises just this side of X-rated, you can be sure that it will end as warm and fuzzy as an old Andy Hardy movie. Raunch, scatology and four-letter words are nothing new in Hollywood comedies. They may have begun as underground outrages ("Pink Flamingos"), but by the time of "Porky's," "American Pie" and the Farrelly brothers they were as mainstream as, well, apple pie. What is new is the shotgun wedding of obscenity and sentimentality. If the bad boy-man hero (it's always a guy) seems stuck in the eternal pigpen of adolescence, you can be sure that by the end he'll have learned his lessons, shouldered responsibility and earned the love of the gorgeous, competent woman he pines for.
How did this formula become the new comic orthodoxy? We can all thank Judd Apatow, whose "40-Year-Old Virgin," "Knocked Up," "Superbad" and "Step Brothers" ushered in the new Hollywood math: scrotums + swear words + third-act saccharin = success. The spirit of Apatow looms heavily over two new comedies, though he had nothing to do with either. Kevin Smith's "Zack and Miri Make a Porno" and David Wain's "Role Models" are both cast with Apatow rep company players, and both share the striking but suddenly ubiquitous conjunction of lowdown raunch and huggable humanism. If this combo came as a sweet surprise in a movie like "Superbad," it's now threatening to become a cliché.
This must all seem very strange to a veteran outré filmmaker like Smith. When his low-budget, trash-talking "Clerks" came out in 1994, it seemed shaggily revolutionary. Its verbose, scruffy store clerks, who could wax eloquent on the fine points of oral sex, paved the way for the slob-prince heroes Seth Rogen now plays. And now Rogen is starring, alongside Elizabeth Banks, in Smith's own "Zack and Miri Make a Porno," a sex-obsessed love story that looks a lot more conventional than its creator may have imagined. The title characters (Rogen and Banks), friends since childhood, platonically share a run-down Pittsburgh apartment made worse when their water and electricity are shut off. Unable to pay the bills, Zack turns to porno for financial rescue. This means convincing his old pal, Miri, to have on-camera sex with him. Guess what? Their coupling is an earth-shaking event that leads each to realize How They Truly Feel About Each Other. As good as Rogen and Banks are, their love story feels born of design, not desire. Despite some scabrously funny dialogue, "Zack and Miri" can't compete with the best of the Apatow comedies, which have wrung finer variations on the moves Smith pioneered. Which puts him in the odd position of looking like a shadow of his shadow.
"Role Models" is even more formulaic, but also a whole lot funnier. The cynical, burnt-out Danny (Paul Rudd) and the swaggering horndog Wheeler (Seann William Scott), energy-drink salesmen, are arrested after a property-destroying freakout and given an option: jail or 150 hours of service as big brothers to troubled kids in the Sturdy Wings program. The sour Danny, who's just been dumped by his lawyer girlfriend (Elizabeth Banks again), is saddled with the superdork Augie (Christopher Mintz-Plasse, a.k.a. "McLovin"), who's totally obsessed with acting out his medieval sword-and-sorcery fantasies. Wheeler gets the incorrigible Ronnie (Bobb'e J. Thompson), a foulmouthed fifth grader who has scared off all previous mentors.
Predictable? Yes, yet within the all-too-familiar uplifting arc of "Role Models" there's real wit and lots of opportunities for the beguiling cast to show off its comic chops. The fun is in the details: Rudd's snarky rant in a coffee shop where the large is called "vente" will resonate with anybody who's ever wondered why Starbucks calls a small a "tall." Scott, who's gone from being a hormone-revved adolescent to a hormone-revved overaged adolescent, gets better at it with every attempt: he and Rudd, at each other's throats, create delightful comic friction. Wain ("Wet Hot American Summer") does his best not to bog down in the puddles of redemption that accumulate in the final reel. Comedies by definition have happy endings, but "Role Models" would have left a deeper mark had it found a way to leave us smiling and surprised. This new comic formula needs shaking up; when the rules get this entrenched, it's time for a new rule book.
神经营销学
Buyology: Truth and Lies
About Why We Buy
By Martin Lindstrom
Doubleday; 240 pp.;
It's a familiar scene if you've ever watched a hospital show. The strapped-down patient is pushed into the narrow tube of a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine and within minutes doctors scan the inner workings of the brain as they search for tumors or lesions. But could the brain scan perhaps also reveal whether the patient likes a new Nokia phone or thrills to the vroom of a Harley-Davidson? That's the premise of neuromarketing. It's a hot trend and the subject of Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy by Danish consultant Martin Lindstrom.
Lindstrom tells us early on that his neuromarketing research took three years, spanned much of the globe, and cost millions of dollars. (Eight unnamed corporations picked up the tab.) But the research takes up only a fraction of this uneven and sometimes frustrating book. For many more of its pages, we accompany Lindstrom on a broad tour of marketing. He discusses the sexual appeal of Abercrombie & Fitch's pitch, the history of subliminal ads, and the origins of the lime slice in a bottle of Mexican beer. Lindstrom entices us with the research, which seems to explain much about human behavior, but delivers it too sparingly. "Before we get to our fMRI test and its startling results," he writes at one point, "let's do a little mind experiment of our own."
Yet another detour. Still, the research in Buyology points to a vital trend: Marketers are feasting on new streams of customer data. They can track our wanderings on the Internet and our purchases at the supermarket, and they can start to predict an individual's behavior. The brain scans—both an advanced version of the electroencephalograph, which employs wired skullcaps, and the more expensive fMRI—provide rich new data streams. But drawing definitive conclusions from them is not easy.
Scientists have mapped out the regions of the brain that dominate lust, anger, attention, our protective instincts, and much more. But when those regions light up with activity, it's not clear what behavior will follow—or how it may vary from one person to the next. Scientists' understanding of such brain activity is like the early cartographers' grasp of geography.
In one of his most interesting chapters, Lindstrom delves into the value of product placement—the branded phones, laptops, and liquors that share the screen for a precious second or two with movie or TV stars. Such positioning is especially important now that viewers have tools to zap traditional 30-second ads. But does product placement work? Lindstrom's researchers place brain-monitoring caps on viewers watching American Idol and then study their responses to the Cokes the judges sip, the Fords the contestants pile into between acts, and Cingular, the cell-phone service that lets the public vote.
As it turns out, the viewers emerge with far stronger memories of Coke than of Cingular. Ford scores worst of all. Lindstrom theorizes that Coke fares better because it insinuates itself into the action. The judges interact with it while they deliberate. Cingular, by contrast, is just a tool for the TV viewers, and Ford is a mere advertisement. In the end, the carmaker doesn't just lose: Its message is annihilated. Viewers seem to remember less about the company after seeing the commercials than before. Lindstrom goes so far as to suggest that the Coke placements push Ford out of people's memories: The automaker spent $26 million in yearly sponsorship only to lose mindshare.
Like much of Buyology, this conclusion is open to debate. Perhaps good feelings about Ford reside deep in viewers' subconscious and will surface months later. Who's to say? Even with the latest technology, much of the activity in the brain remains invisible, or indecipherable, to us.
Take my brain. As I read the last two chapters of Buyology on a train, a chatty couple sits next to me. They talk. Try as I might, I can't help but listen. If I were wearing a wired skullcap, the patterns might suggest that the duo has captured my attention. Does it mean I'm a fan of theirs? Not by any stretch. Is another region in my brain signaling anger or frustration? Is it shining bright? It's tough to translate these brain patterns. But neuromarketers, including Lindstrom, are busy working at it.
时间就是金钱
6 Cents Is 6 Cents, but Time? That’s Something
I once lived in rural France for half a year, in a region of southern Burgundy known to epicures for its fine cattle and wine. It was also known for being the French boondocks — we got the feeling from Parisian friends that they thought we were living somewhere vaguely akin to a suburb of Binghamton. Indeed, driving to the closest supermarket took close to half an hour, sometimes longer on the occasions when my husband and I realized, 10 minutes into the drive, that we’d forgotten our plastic bags and had to turn right around to get them.
My husband and I weren’t particularly green at the time, which was seven years ago. Nor was anyone else in that rural part of France, as far as we could tell. What they were was frugal. “Everyone has porcupines in their pockets,” a neighbor there once told me — in other words, it really hurt to reach for their wallets. That mattered when it came to plastic bags, because you had to pay for them at the store.
The store, E.Leclerc, was a sprawling emporium that sold household goods along with groceries — think Kmart, only with an entire aisle devoted to 23 varieties of yogurt. The store bags were plastic, but a thickish plastic, with sturdy handles. We always intended to put the empty ones back in the car for the next trip, but every once in a while, they were left behind in the pantry, and then we’d find ourselves in a bind.
The bags were maybe 30 cents each, but it wasn’t just the financial hit that made us waste all that time turning around to go home. It was shame.
You’d start loading your groceries onto the conveyor belt, and then would have to explain to the clerk that you’d forgotten your bags. She would grimace. For some reason, the bags had to be paid for in a separate transaction. This was slightly more laborious for her, and checkout time at E.Leclerc was a precise, even tense, exercise in speed.
Our neighbors timed their grocery shops to the minute: By 11:45, the store was empty, with everyone at home cooking up whatever they’d just bought for lunch. So not only was the store clerk irritated, but the people in back of us were too. Tell the clerk you need to buy bags, and you would get the same reaction that people in New York do when they announce, in some grocery store express line, that they have to pay by check. Groaning, shifting of feet, loud, deliberate sighing.
But it was not just the extra time it took that made those sighs so loaded, those groans so embarrassing. It was the knowledge that most likely, in that entire store, we were the only ones foolish enough to be shelling out $3 for bags that we had sitting around at home, empty, in some pile in the pantry. These were a frugal people, respectful of the porcupine. And we — well, we were Americans.
None of the tsk-tsking was about the landfill. It was about common sense, and the absurdity of the uselessly new. Our neighbors had 100-year-old armoires in their homes, not because they were exquisite antiques, but because someone in their family had bought them around then and they still worked just fine. One neighbor used to come by our house with what we’d call roadpear: pears, some a bit rotting, that he noticed by the side of the road on his way over. He would peel them and sauté them in butter, and we’d all be in roadpear heaven.
Critics of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s recently announced plan to charge a 6-cent fee for plastic bags have argued that the charge could not come at a worse time, now that people are counting every penny with care. But from a green point of view, it could not have come at a better time — even the city’s more affluent shoppers, who once might have considered 6 cents per bag a bargain for the convenience, might quickly change their habits.
So much of the green movement seems to be one big push to upgrade responsibly — in other words, to shop: for green makeup, green clothing, green carpeting. Charging for plastic bags may seem to be adding one more item to the shopping list, but with useless spending going far out of fashion, the opposite might be true.
If the mayor really wants to stop people from using plastic bags, he might consider requiring that the transaction take a few minutes longer. New Yorkers have gotten used to wasting money, but they’ll never put up with wasting time. Especially if you’re standing in front of them, wasting theirs.
affluent a. 富裕的,富足的,丰富的
副 词：af'flu·ent·ly
His circumstances are more affluent than ever.
He was affluent in worldly goods.
antique n. 古董,古物a. 旧式的,过时的
exquisite a. 精致的,细腻的,敏锐
名 词：ex'qui·site·ness
副 词：ex'qui·site·ly
This is an exquisite photo album.
The hostess had exquisite taste in clothes.
armoires n. 大型衣橱
absurdity n. 荒谬,悖理,荒谬的事
名 词：ab·surd'i·ty, ab·surd'ness
副 词：ab·surd'ly
The fallacy has been exposed in its naked absurdity.
He smiled at the manifest absurdity.
Your explanation involves a gross absurdity.
landfill 废碴填埋填埋场垃圾填埋场
tsk int.[表示不赞成、同情、不耐烦等]啧啧
Groan n. 呻吟,叹息vi. 呻吟,渴望,受压迫vt. 呻吟地说
irritate vt. 激怒,使发怒,使不舒服,使发炎vi. 引起不快
时 态：ir·ri·tat·ed, ir·ri·tat·ing, ir·ri·tates
名 词：ir'ri·ta'tor
副 词：ir'ri·tat'ing·ly
She was adept at the fine art of irritating people.
His little affectations irritated her.
grimace n. 面部的歪扭,鬼脸,痛苦的表情vi. 扮鬼脸,作苦相
pantry n. 餐具室,食品室
aisle n. 走廊,通道,过道
emporium n. 商场,大百货商店
sprawling 无计划地占用山林农田建造厂房(的)
porcupines n. 豪猪
frugal a. 节俭的,朴素的
akin a. 同族的,同类的,类似的
例句：The cat is akin to the tiger.
Pity is akin to love.
He felt something akin to pity.
The two families are akin.
boondocks n. 森林地带;偏僻地区
epicures 美食家,老饕
句子：（沪友firebow分享）
1. they thought we were living somewhere vaguely akin to a suburb of Binghamton.
通过虚拟语气来说明法国居住地位置比较偏僻。
2. My husband and I weren’t particularly green at the time, which was seven years ago.
Green 表示环保，从环保的角度出发。后文提到，自带购物袋在法国的使用是从节约的角度出发的（金钱和时间！）
3. but it wasn’t just the financial hit that made us waste all that time turning around to go home.
指出返回家取购物袋并不仅是金钱的原因，这只是次要原因。
4. Everyone has porcupines in their pocket. 用于形容节俭。
5. It was the knowledge that most likely…… 委婉指出叹息声的根本原因，强调自己的羞愧感。
6. These were a frugal people, respectful of the porcupine. And we – well, we were Americans. 强调了法国人节俭的特点（注意手法！—— respectful of the porcupine）对比两国差异。
7. count every penny with care. 开始节约
8. New Yorkers have gotten used to wasting money, but they’ll never put up with wasting time. Especially if you’re standing in front of them, wasting theirs.
句子结构简单，起了对比的作用，突出了美国人对时间的重视！
石油供应危机
After the credit crunch, the oil crunch: watchdog warns over falling supplies
The International Energy Agency is to call today for an energy revolution and a "major de-carbonisation" of global fuel sources as the world confronts tighter oil supplies caused by shrinking investment.
The energy watchdog is warning for the first time that oil output could pass its peak as power shifts from "super-majors" to national companies controlled by producer states. It highlights a potential oil-supply crunch.
The unprecedented wake-up call comes as the European commission says in a report due out tomorrow that while oilfields decline, the balance of supply and demand will become "increasingly tight, possibly critically so".
It adds: "The need to address climate change will require a massive switch to high-efficiency, low-carbon energy technologies."
The commission report warns that oil supplies are limited, with reserves and spare output capacity concentrated in a few hands. "Recent severe price rises and volatility on oil and gas markets reflect these changing trends", it says.
Both bodies express heightened anxieties that the west's energy requirements could be squeezed as emerging economies such as China consume more oil and conclude long-term deals with oil-rich states. This could be exacerbated by a restriction on investment by the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) - possibly joined by Russia - to boost revenues. Opec will control 51% of output by 2030 compared with 44% in 2007.
Rising demand
The IEA's latest World Energy Outlook predicts that global energy demand will increase 45% between now and 2030 and oil prices will rise to $200 a barrel by then - or $120 at 2007 prices.
It says the recent surge in prices to just shy of $150 this summer has highlighted the "ultimately finite" nature of oil and gas reserves.
"The immediate risk to supply is not one of a lack of global resources, but rather a lack of investment," the report says. "Upstream investment has been rising rapidly in nominal terms but much of the increase is due to surging costs and the need to combat rising decline rates - especially in higher-cost provinces."
"Expanding production in the lowest-cost countries will be central to meeting the world's needs at reasonable cost."
The IEA was founded during the oil crisis of 1973-74 and acts as energy policy adviser to 28 countries including Britain.
Global oil demand and supply is projected to rise from 84m barrels a day to 106m in 2030, with all of this increase driven by emerging economies, but the IEA sees conventional oil output peaking before then. Most of the increased production will come from natural gas liquids and non-conventional technologies such as Canadian oil sands.
Adequate investment
The agency says there is enough oil to support rising demand and output, with proven reserves of up to 1.3tn barrels - or enough for 40 years - and potential reserves of as much as 3.5tn barrels. But it says the increased output "hinges on adequate and timely investment".
Up to 64m barrels a day of extra gross capacity - the equivalent to almost six times that of Saudi Arabia today - needs to come on stream between 2007 and 2030. Almost half of that is required by 2015, with an extra 7m barrels a day over current plans approved within the next two years "to avoid a fall in spare capacity towards the middle of the next decade".
The IEA warns bluntly: "There remains a real risk that under-investment will cause an oil-supply crunch in that timeframe."
It says a detailed analysis of 800 fields owned by 54 "super-giants" shows that the decline in production is likely to accelerate as oilfields become depleted. This means that the global decline rate of 6.7% for fields past their peak will increase to 8.6% in 2030 and may fall even faster, at 10.5%, without adequate investment.
The 50 largest oil companies, the IEA says, plan to invest $600bn (?380bn) in upstream oil and gas by 2012. But such companies often do not have access to the regions with the largest reserves. The national companies in countries such as Saudi Arabia and Venezuela will account for 80% of increased output by 2030.
"The dominance of national companies may make it less certain that the investment projected in this outlook will actually be made," it says, pointing to the lack of financial firepower and technical expertise of such firms.
Claude Turmes, a Green MEP and rapporteur on renewables for the European parliament, said: "IEA is talking about a huge disruption to the market between now and 2015 and in the long-run - without a huge investment in Saudi, Iraq and Iran which may not be in their interest."
Like the commission, the IEA calls for a dramatic shift towards "greener" energy to prevent global warming, saying that, on unchanged policies, the average temperature will rise 6°C by the end of the century. That is triple the maximum increase sought by the EU in its climate change policies.
It says that, on current trends, greenhouse gas emissions will rise by 45% to 41 gigatonnes (Gt) in 2030, with three-quarters of the increase coming from China, India and the Middle East as urbanisation there grows exponentially.
In its most ambitious scenario for cutting emissions and limiting the global temperature rise to 2°C, it says hundreds of millions of homes and businesses will have to change the way they use energy.
OECD countries will have to cut emissions by 40% from 2006 levels by 2030 while emerging economies will have to limit emissions growth to 20%.
1 crunch vt. vi. 嘎扎嘎扎的咬嚼,压碎,扎扎地踏过
n. 咬碎,咬碎声,扎扎地踏
危机，紧要关头
2 volatility n. 挥发性,挥发度,轻快,易变,短暂
3 exacerbate vt. 恶化,增剧,激怒,使加剧
4 finite a. 有限的,有穷的,限定的 n. 有限物
5 nominal a. 名义上的,名字的,有名无实的,稍许的
n. 名词性词 公称、额定
6 hinge n. 铰链,关键,枢纽
vt. 装铰链
vi. 靠铰链移动,依…而转移
7 depleted 废弃的
8 rapporteur n. 大会报告起草人
9 gigaton n. 十亿吨
10 exponentially ad. 以指数方式
11 scenario n. 情节,剧本;
